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Incoming!

As you know, I help out on forums from time-to-time… Well, a lot actually. But sometimes people just don’t seem to want to give up the most basic of information which might help diagnose the problem.

I’ve blogged about this in the past and this example, especially the response to my initial question, shows the utter uselessness of the information given.

Eejit: My stored procedure doesn’t work. It has an error.
(A stored procedure was listed with no obvious point of failure)
Me: What is the error?
Eejit: The error code is not zero but another number.
(Note: Zero = success, an other number indicates various types of error)
Me: What is the error code given?

At this point I just want to give up in dispair. Do these people go to their doctor and say simply: “I feel unwell. It hurts.” And then where the doctor asks where they respond: “Somewhere on my body.” Do they expect their doctor to diagnose them with that level of information. Maybe they should have seen a vet – at least then they could have been put out of their misery!

NOTE: This was rescued from the Google Cache. The original was posted on Sunday, 18th March 2007

Original Comments:

It doesn’t matter when you see the doctor as you’ll be going away with a prescription for Asprin or Paracetomol!

At some point you just need to say, sorry I can’t help you if you’re not able to help me to understand your problem. Perhaps you’d like to try another forum!

3/28/2007 9:57 PM | John A Thomson

It usually comes down to that. I do have to bite my tongue (or fingers in this case) as I try not to sound too irritated. Which is why I occasionally have to vent on my blog.

3/28/2007 10:14 PM | Colin Angus Mackay

When I was active in the newsgroups/forums I got this kind of frustration so often that in the end I created a set of rules and posted them to my blog. Next time someone broke a rule, I would reply with just the URL to the rules and nothing else. Soon other MVP and MSFT support people started doing the same: http://www.danielmoth.com/Blog/2005/03/please-read-before-posting-to-ng.html